ept staring at him, as if she doubted her eyes and ears. She
felt a certain awe of her brother. "Where you goin'?" she inquired,
half timidly.

"I'll tell you when I get back," replied Jerome. He went out with
dignity, and Elmira heard him on the stairs. "He's goin' to dress
up," she thought.

She sat down by the window, well behind the curtain, that any one
approaching might not see her, and waited. She had wakened that
morning as into a new birth of sense, and greeted the world with
helpless childish weeping, but now she was beginning to settle
comfortably into this strange order of things. Her face, as she sat
thus, wore the ready curves of smiles instead of tears. Elmira was
one whose strength would always be in dependence. Now her young
brother showed himself, as if by a miracle, a leader and a strong
prop, and she could assume again her natural attitude of life and
growth. She was no longer strange to herself in these strange ways,
and that was wherein all the bitterness of strangeness lay.

When Jerome came down-stairs, in his little poor best jacket and
trousers and his clean Sunday shirt, she stood in the door and looked
at him curiously, but with a perfect rest of confidence.

Jerome looked at her with dignity, and yet with a certain childish
importance, without which he would have ceased to be himself at all.
"Look out for mother," he whispered, admonishingly, and went out,
holding his head up and his shoulders back, and feeling his sister's
wondering and admiring eyes upon him, with a weakness of pride, and
yet with no abatement of his strength of purpose, which was great
enough to withstand self-recognition.

The boy that morning had a new gait when he had once started down the
road. The habit of his whole life--and, more than that, an inherited
habit--ceased to influence him. This new exaltation of spirit
controlled even bones and muscles.

Jerome, now he had fairly struck out in life with a purpose of his
own, walked no longer like his poor father, with that bent shuffling
lope of worn-out middle age. His soul informed his whole body, and
raised it above that of any simple animal that seeks a journey's end.
His head was up and steady, as if he bore a treasure-jar on it, his
back flat as a soldier's; he swung his little arms at his sides and
advanced with proud and even pace.

Jerome's old gaping shoes were nicely greased, and he himself had
made a last endeavor to close the worst apertures with a